How to Make Mincemeat

The Kennedy Administration's ballooning advisory corps continued to draw criticism, and some of the most withering words of all came last week from a man with all the credentials for being a White House insider. Hans J. Morgenthau* is director of the University of Chicago Center for the study of American Foreign and Military Policy and a onetime (1949-51) State Department adviser in the Truman Administration. Wrote he in the liberal New Leader:

"President Kennedy has done away with the committee system of governing, and has surrounded himself with a number of individual advisers, in different degrees brilliant, knowledgeable and experienced. These advisers, operating as equals, are supposed to present the President with a variety of individual views from which he can choose. This concept of Presidential government has considerable merit compared to the committee system which it is intended to replace, but it is not likely to work in practice.

"The successive presentation of views and recommendations by isolated individuals is no substitute for the dialectic confrontation of such views in a group which can put differing opinions to the test of empirical verification and logical analysis. Also, in a contest among equals for the President's ear those with offices in the White House are likely to be more equal than those with offices in Foggy Bottom. This system also tends to separate the men of ideas from the men of facts and gives an inevitable advantage to brilliant presentation unchecked by practical experience.

"We all smile in memory of what was once a maxim of our Government: that a man who knows how to run General Motors knows by definition how to run the Department of Defense. It is, however, not self-evident that a man who knows how to run a university is thereby qualified to run the foreign policy of the U.S., and that an intellectual who knows how to lecture and write books knows also how to make foreign policy.

"The intellectual does not need to have, and is frequently devoid of, that quality which is indispensable in the statesman--practical wisdom. In the world of the intellectual, ideas meet with ideas, and anything goes that is presented cleverly and with assurance. In the political world, ideas meet with facts which make mincemeat of the wrong ideas and throw the pieces in the ashcan of history."

* No kin to onetime Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau.

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